We were finally all back for the walk for the first time in 2 weeks. Joan explained that she was going to call this morning at 8:00 am to make an appointment for her broken arm so Diane offered to take her place and stay with mom. After the walk I went right to work on the barn. We need seating for 100 people for a wedding reception so tables were moved in and placed to make sure they would all fit. There were a few dishes to do then I went upstairs to give the game room a good cleaning. I was just finishing up when Phil and Nolan arrived to work on the furnace. It was noon by the time I got home. Mark wanted a little help with a stop sign and I needed help getting a bale in for Valiant so Valiant got done first.
This bale went in perfectly on the first try, check out Mark's smile as he backs the tractor away.
The hay is awesome. This bale is from our second cutting, still nice and green and fine stemmed. Valiant will do well on it.
He always gets the best hay as he will lose weight during breeding season. He spends too much time trying to impress the mares and forgets to eat. I try to get him bulked up in the winter with the very best hay we have. Mark had me hold the t-post while he drilled a hole in so he could mount the stop sign. He found the sign in the woods earlier, pulled it out, gave it a good cleaning and drilled a hole in it for easy mounting. I forgot to take a picture of the final project but it is now mounted and up. I left then for Sam's club. I needed more styrofoam cups for the barn and can buy a box of 1000 there. I also needed more rolls of paper towels at the barn. I also picked up a case of water bottles for the apartment, a pie for Berean tomorrow and shrimp for Mark. For myself I bought 2 heads of iceberg lettuce. I really don't like those boxes of weeds they call spring mix nor do I care for romaine. Just give me plain old iceberg for my salad. I got home just in time to make supper. We started with a small bowl of chicken tortilla soup then finished with steak and wild rice both left over from yesterday's meal. After supper I started on the fire starters. Diane brought a bunch of old candles over to the barn and no one else wanted them. I have a fun way to use them. I put a candle in a pan on low heat (it doesn't take a lot of heat to melt the wax) roll up a napkin, dip it into the liquid wax, lay it on a paper plate to cool then when cool store them in a bag. This is a fun activity for kids especially if you show them how well they start fires. Below are a few pictures.
The candle is melted in the pan over a very low fire.
I lay out a few small paper plates, grab a napkin and roll it up then dip it in the melted wax. Don't worry if the plate ends up with wax on it, save the plate and use that as a fire started too.
Lay it on the paper plate to cool.
As one of the candles was in a glass jar about half empty of red wax I melted another red candle, hung a wick and topped the jar off with melted wax.
By the time I finished tonight I had over 50 fire starters made.
We had a fire going in the wood burner I just threw one in the front to show how well it burns. This one burned for over 6 minutes.
If not interested in watching the entire video just skip to the end to see how it was still burning after 6 minutes. These really make it easy to start our living room wood burner, I just put it under some kindling then add the bigger logs once it is going. It burns hot and clean. I still have the candles below to melt but will probably do that on Friday when I have Ben and Taunya's boys over.
The gym was busy tonight with the girls volley ball league. These players are all in the family, every player is related to everyone that plays. They sure have a lot of fun together.
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